OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Catalog of Optimization Strategies and Realizations for Composed Integration Patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

The discipline of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is the centrepiece of current on-premise, cloud and device integration scenarios. However, the building blocks of integration scenarios, i.e., essentially a composition of Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIPs), are only informally described, and thus their composition takes place in an informal, ad-hoc manner. This leads to several issues including a currently missing optimization of application integration scenarios. In this work, we collect and briefly explain the usage of process optimizations from the literature for integration scenario processes as catalog.
Cyber Security Challenges and Solutions for V2X Communications: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In recent years, vehicles became able to establish connections with other vehicles and infrastructure units that are located in the roadside. In the near future, the vehicular network will be expanded to include the communication between vehicles and any smart devices in the roadside which is called Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. The vehicular network causes many challenges due to heterogeneous nodes, various speeds and intermittent connection, where traditional security methods are not always efficacious. As a result, an extensive variety of research works has been done on optimizing security solutions whilst considering network requirements. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey and taxonomy of the existing security solutions for V2X communication technology. Then, we provide discussions and comparisons with regard to some pertinent criteria. Also, we present a threat analysis for V2X enabling technologies. Finally, we point out the research challenges and some future directions.
PointCleanNet: Learning to Denoise and Remove Outliers from Dense Point Clouds
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2019
Year: 2019

Point clouds obtained with 3D scanners or by image-based reconstruction techniques are often corrupted with significant amount of noise and outliers. Traditional methods for point cloud denoising largely rely on local surface fitting (e.g., jets or MLS surfaces), local or non-local averaging, or on statistical assumptions about the underlying noise model. In contrast, we develop a simple data-driven method for removing outliers and reducing noise in unordered point clouds. We base our approach on a deep learning architecture adapted from PCPNet, which was recently proposed for estimating local 3D shape properties in point clouds. Our method first classifies and discards outlier samples, and then estimates correction vectors that project noisy points onto the original clean surfaces. The approach is efficient and robust to varying amounts of noise and outliers, while being able to handle large densely-sampled point clouds. In our extensive evaluation, both on synthesic and real data, we show an increased robustness to strong noise levels compared to various state-of-the-art methods, enabling accurate surface reconstruction from extremely noisy real data obtained by range scans. Finally, the simplicity and universality of our approach makes it very easy to integrate in any existing geometry processing pipeline.
Adversarial CAPTCHAs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Following the principle of to set one's own spear against one's own shield, we study how to design adversarial CAPTCHAs in this paper. We first identify the similarity and difference between adversarial CAPTCHA generation and existing hot adversarial example (image) generation research. Then, we propose a framework for text-based and image-based adversarial CAPTCHA generation on top of state-of-the-art adversarial image generation techniques. Finally, we design and implement an adversarial CAPTCHA generation and evaluation system, named aCAPTCHA, which integrates 10 image preprocessing techniques, 9 CAPTCHA attacks, 4 baseline adversarial CAPTCHA generation methods, and 8 new adversarial CAPTCHA generation methods. To examine the performance of aCAPTCHA, extensive security and usability evaluations are conducted. The results demonstrate that the generated adversarial CAPTCHAs can significantly improve the security of normal CAPTCHAs while maintaining similar usability. To facilitate the CAPTCHA security research, we also open source the aCAPTCHA system, including the source code, trained models, datasets, and the usability evaluation interfaces.
Information flow in a distributed security setting
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2019
Year: 2019

Information flow security is classically formulated in terms of the absence of illegal information flows, with respect to a security setting consisting of a single flow policy that specifies what information flows should be permitted in the system. In this paper we investigate the security issues that emerge in distributed security settings, where each computation domain establishes its own local security policy, and where programs may exhibit location-dependent behavior. In particular, we study the interplay between two distinct flow policy layers: the declared flow policy, established by the program itself, and the allowed flow policy, established externally to the program by each computation domain. We refine two security properties that articulate how the behaviors of programs comply to the respective flow policies: Distributed Non-disclosure, for enabling programs to declare locally scoped flow policies; and Flow Policy Confinement, for controlling the flow policies that are declared by programs. We present enforcement mechanisms that are based on type and effect systems, ranging from purely static mechanisms to hybrid combinations with dynamic migration control, for enforcing the above properties on an expressive ML-like language with concurrent threads and code migration, and which includes an allowed flow policy construct that dynamically tests the allowed flow policy of the current context. Finally, we show that the combination of the above two properties guarantees that actual information flows do not violate the relevant allowed flow policies. To this end we propose and use the Distributed Non-Interference property, a natural generalization of Non-Interference to a distributed security setting that ensures that information flows in a program respect the allowed flow policy of the domains where they originate.
Information Measure Similarity Theory: Message Importance Measure via Shannon Entropy
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Rare events attract more attention and interests in many scenarios of big data such as anomaly detection and security systems. To characterize the rare events importance from probabilistic perspective, the message importance measure (MIM) is proposed as a kind of semantics analysis tool. Similar to Shannon entropy, the MIM has its special functional on information processing, in which the parameter $\varpi$ of MIM plays a vital role. Actually, the parameter $\varpi$ dominates the properties of MIM, based on which the MIM has three work regions where the corresponding parameters satisfy $ 0 \le \varpi \le 2/\max\{p(x_i)\}$, $\varpi > 2/\max\{p(x_i)\}$ and $\varpi < 0$ respectively. Furthermore, in the case $ 0 \le \varpi \le 2/\max\{p(x_i)\}$, there are some similarity between the MIM and Shannon entropy in the information compression and transmission, which provide a new viewpoint for information theory. This paper first constructs a system model with message importance measure and proposes the message importance loss to enrich the information processing strategies. Moreover, we propose the message importance loss capacity to measure the information importance harvest in a transmission. Furthermore, the message importance distortion function is presented to give an upper bound of information compression based on message importance measure. Additionally, the bitrate transmission constrained by the message importance loss is investigated to broaden the scope for Shannon information theory.
V-Fuzz: Vulnerability-Oriented Evolutionary Fuzzing
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Fuzzing is a technique of finding bugs by executing a software recurrently with a large number of abnormal inputs. Most of the existing fuzzers consider all parts of a software equally, and pay too much attention on how to improve the code coverage. It is inefficient as the vulnerable code only takes a tiny fraction of the entire code. In this paper, we design and implement a vulnerability-oriented evolutionary fuzzing prototype named V-Fuzz, which aims to find bugs efficiently and quickly in a limited time. V-Fuzz consists of two main components: a neural network-based vulnerability prediction model and a vulnerability-oriented evolutionary fuzzer. Given a binary program to V-Fuzz, the vulnerability prediction model will give a prior estimation on which parts of the software are more likely to be vulnerable. Then, the fuzzer leverages an evolutionary algorithm to generate inputs which tend to arrive at the vulnerable locations, guided by the vulnerability prediction result. Experimental results demonstrate that V-Fuzz can find bugs more efficiently than state-of-the-art fuzzers. Moreover, V-Fuzz has discovered 10 CVEs, and 3 of them are newly discovered. We reported the new CVEs, and they have been confirmed and fixed.
Network-based Analysis and Classification of Malware using Behavioral Artifacts Ordering
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Using runtime execution artifacts to identify malware and its associated family is an established technique in the security domain. Many papers in the literature rely on explicit features derived from network, file system, or registry interaction. While effective, the use of these fine-granularity data points makes these techniques computationally expensive. Moreover, the signatures and heuristics are often circumvented by subsequent malware authors. In this work, we propose Chatter, a system that is concerned only with the order in which high-level system events take place. Individual events are mapped onto an alphabet and execution traces are captured via terse concatenations of those letters. Then, leveraging an analyst labeled corpus of malware, n-gram document classification techniques are applied to produce a classifier predicting malware family. This paper describes that technique and its proof-of-concept evaluation. In its prototype form, only network events are considered and eleven malware families are used. We show the technique achieves 83%-94% accuracy in isolation and makes non-trivial performance improvements when integrated with a baseline classifier of combined order features to reach an accuracy of up to 98.8%.
PopNetCod: A Popularity-based Caching Policy for Network Coding enabled Named Data Networking
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we propose PopNetCod, a popularity-based caching policy for network coding enabled Named Data Networking. PopNetCod is a distributed caching policy, in which each router measures the local popularity of the content objects by analyzing the requests that it receives. It then uses this information to decide which Data packets to cache or evict from its content store. Since network coding is used, partial caching of content objects is supported, which facilitates the management of the content store. The routers decide the Data packets that they cache or evict in an online manner when they receive requests for Data packets. This allows the most popular Data packets to be cached closer to the network edges. The evaluation of PopNetCod shows an improved cache-hit rate compared to the widely used Leave Copy Everywhere placement policy and the Least Recently Used eviction policy. The improved cache-hit rate helps the clients to achieve higher goodput, while it also reduces the load on the source servers.
Efficient, Dynamic Multi-tenant Edge Computation in EdgeOS
Venue: arXiv cs.OS 2019
Year: 2019

In the future, computing will be immersed in the world around us -- from augmented reality to autonomous vehicles to the Internet of Things. Many of these smart devices will offer services that respond in real time to their physical surroundings, requiring complex processing with strict performance guarantees. Edge clouds promise a pervasive computational infrastructure a short network hop away from end devices, but today's operating systems are a poor fit to meet the goals of scalable isolation, dense multi-tenancy, and predictable performance required by these emerging applications. In this paper we present EdgeOS, a micro-kernel based operating system that meets these goals by blending recent advances in real-time systems and network function virtualization. EdgeOS introduces a Featherweight Process model that offers lightweight isolation and supports extreme scalability even under high churn. Our architecture provides efficient communication mechanisms, and low-overhead per-client isolation. To achieve high performance networking, EdgeOS employs kernel bypass paired with the isolation properties of Featherweight Processes. We have evaluated our EdgeOS prototype for running high scale network middleboxes using the Click software router and endpoint applications using memcached. EdgeOS reduces startup latency by 170X compared to Linux processes and over five orders of magnitude compared to containers, while providing three orders of magnitude latency improvement when running 300 to 1000 edge-cloud memcached instances on one server.
Adversarial Examples Versus Cloud-based Detectors: A Black-box Empirical Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Deep learning has been broadly leveraged by major cloud providers, such as Google, AWS and Baidu, to offer various computer vision related services including image classification, object identification, illegal image detection, etc. While recent works extensively demonstrated that deep learning classification models are vulnerable to adversarial examples, cloud-based image detection models, which are more complicated than classifiers, may also have similar security concern but not get enough attention yet. In this paper, we mainly focus on the security issues of real-world cloud-based image detectors. Specifically, (1) based on effective semantic segmentation, we propose four attacks to generate semantics-aware adversarial examples via only interacting with black-box APIs; and (2) we make the first attempt to conduct an extensive empirical study of black-box attacks against real-world cloud-based image detectors. Through the comprehensive evaluations on five major cloud platforms: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Baidu Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud, we demonstrate that our image processing based attacks can reach a success rate of approximately 100%, and the semantic segmentation based attacks have a success rate over 90% among different detection services, such as violence, politician, and pornography detection. We also proposed several possible defense strategies for these security challenges in the real-life situation.
StreamBox-HBM: Stream Analytics on High Bandwidth Hybrid Memory
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

Stream analytics have an insatiable demand for memory and performance. Emerging hybrid memories combine commodity DDR4 DRAM with 3D-stacked High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) DRAM to meet such demands. However, achieving this promise is challenging because (1) HBM is capacity-limited and (2) HBM boosts performance best for sequential access and high parallelism workloads. At first glance, stream analytics appear a particularly poor match for HBM because they have high capacity demands and data grouping operations, their most demanding computations, use random access. This paper presents the design and implementation of StreamBox-HBM, a stream analytics engine that exploits hybrid memories to achieve scalable high performance. StreamBox-HBM performs data grouping with sequential access sorting algorithms in HBM, in contrast to random access hashing algorithms commonly used in DRAM. StreamBox-HBM solely uses HBM to store Key Pointer Array (KPA) data structures that contain only partial records (keys and pointers to full records) for grouping operations. It dynamically creates and manages prodigious data and pipeline parallelism, choosing when to allocate KPAs in HBM. It dynamically optimizes for both the high bandwidth and limited capacity of HBM, and the limited bandwidth and high capacity of standard DRAM. StreamBox-HBM achieves 110 million records per second and 238 GB/s memory bandwidth while effectively utilizing all 64 cores of Intel's Knights Landing, a commercial server with hybrid memory. It outperforms stream engines with sequential access algorithms without KPAs by 7x and stream engines with random access algorithms by an order of magnitude in throughput. To the best of our knowledge, StreamBox-HBM is the first stream engine optimized for hybrid memories.
ECrits - Visualizing Support Ticket Escalation Risk
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Managing support tickets in large, multi-product organizations is difficult. Failure to meet the expectations of customers can lead to the escalation of support tickets, which is costly for IBM in terms of customer relationships and resources spent addressing the escalation. Keeping the customer happy is an important task in requirements engineering, which often comes in the form of handling their problems brought forth in support tickets. Proper attention to customers, their issues, and the bottom-up requirements that surface through bug reports can be difficult when the support process involves spending a lot of time managing customers to prevent escalations. For any given support analyst, understanding the customer is achievable through time spent looking through past and present support tickets within their organization; however, this solution does not scale up to account for all support tickets across all product teams. ECrits is a tool developed to help mitigate information overload by selectively mining customer information from support ticket repositories, displaying that data to support analysts, and doing predictive modelling on that data to suggest which support tickets are likely to escalate.
Stereoscopic Dark Flash for Low-light Photography
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this work, we present a camera configuration for acquiring "stereoscopic dark flash" images: a simultaneous stereo pair in which one camera is a conventional RGB sensor, but the other camera is sensitive to near-infrared and near-ultraviolet instead of R and B. When paired with a "dark" flash (i.e., one having near-infrared and near-ultraviolet light, but no visible light) this camera allows us to capture the two images in a flash/no-flash image pair at the same time, all while not disturbing any human subjects or onlookers with a dazzling visible flash. We present a hardware prototype of this camera that approximates an idealized camera, and we present an imaging procedure that let us acquire dark flash stereo pairs that closely resemble those we would get from that idealized camera. We then present a technique for fusing these stereo pairs, first by performing registration and warping, and then by using recent advances in hyperspectral image fusion and deep learning to produce a final image. Because our camera configuration and our data acquisition process allow us to capture true low-noise long exposure RGB images alongside our dark flash stereo pairs, our learned model can be trained end-to-end to produce a fused image that retains the color and tone of a real RGB image while having the low-noise properties of a flash image.
Towards Secure Slicing: Using Slice Isolation to Mitigate DDoS Attacks on 5G Core Network Slices
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we propose a solution to proactively mitigate Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks in 5G core network slicing using slice isolation. Network slicing is one of the key technologies that allow 5G networks to offer dedicated resources to different industries (services). However, a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack could severely impact the performance and availability of the slices as they could share the same physical resources in a multi-tenant virtualized networking infrastructure. Slice isolation is an essential requirement for 5G network slicing. In this paper, we use network isolation to tackle the challenging problem of Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks in 5G network slicing. We propose the use of a mathematical model that can provide on-demand slice isolation as well as guarantee end-to-end delay for 5G core network slices. We evaluate the proposed work with a mix of simulation and experimental work. Our results show that the proposed isolation could mitigate Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks as well as increase the availability of the slices. We believe this work will encourage further research in securing 5G network slicing.
Software Testing Process Models Benefits & Drawbacks: a Systematic Literature Review
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Context: Software testing plays an essential role in product quality improvement. For this reason, several software testing models have been developed to support organizations. However, adoption of testing process models inside organizations is still sporadic, with a need for more evidence about reported experiences. Aim: Our goal is to identify results gathered from the application of software testing models in organizational contexts. We focus on characteristics such as the context of use, practices applied in different testing process phases, and reported benefits & drawbacks. Method: We performed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) focused on studies about the application of software testing processes, complemented by results from previous reviews. Results: From 35 primary studies and survey-based articles, we collected 17 testing models. Although most of the existing models are described as applicable to general contexts, the evidence obtained from the studies shows that some models are not suitable for all enterprise sizes, and inadequate for specific domains. Conclusion: The SLR evidence can serve to compare different software testing models for applicability inside organizations. Both benefits and drawbacks, as reported in the surveyed cases, allow getting a better view of the strengths and weaknesses of each model.
Early Prediction of Alzheimer's Disease Dementia Based on Baseline Hippocampal MRI and 1-Year Follow-Up Cognitive Measures Using Deep Recurrent Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Multi-modal biological, imaging, and neuropsychological markers have demonstrated promising performance for distinguishing Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients from cognitively normal elders. However, it remains difficult to early predict when and which mild cognitive impairment (MCI) individuals will convert to AD dementia. Informed by pattern classification studies which have demonstrated that pattern classifiers built on longitudinal data could achieve better classification performance than those built on cross-sectional data, we develop a deep learning model based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to learn informative representation and temporal dynamics of longitudinal cognitive measures of individual subjects and combine them with baseline hippocampal MRI for building a prognostic model of AD dementia progression. Experimental results on a large cohort of MCI subjects have demonstrated that the deep learning model could learn informative measures from longitudinal data for characterizing the progression of MCI subjects to AD dementia, and the prognostic model could early predict AD progression with high accuracy.